Istar of Babylon: A Phantasy. Margaret Horton Potter
of people to the right and left sank, as a man, to their knees, bowing to the dust. Charmides raised his eyes and beheld her sitting upon the broad platform of the car. And as he looked, as he knelt, even as his brow touched the ground, Charmides knew that he had not been deceived, that rumor had spoken truth, because more than truth could not here be spoken. Yet when she had passed, the Greek did not know her. He had not seen so much as a line of her figure. She swam in a glory of light that radiated from herself. Her head had been crowned, yet with what he did not know. His heart and head were afire, and he heeded nothing more of the procession. Most of all, he did not hear the words of the man behind him, who had knelt with the rest at the approach of the car, because fear of death is a great leveller; but had the words that he muttered been heard and understood by the populace, it is doubtful whether all his influence had saved his life from them.
"Asha confound this instrument of evil! Yahveh's wrath light upon her soul! God of Judea visit her with the fires of Sheol!" And then the former servant of Nebuchadrezzar the Great rose and turned away through the crowd. Charmides later sought vainly for his Phœnician-tongued informant, whom men to-day call Daniel the prophet.
While the Greek still stood, dazed and stupid, his head swimming with the delight of knowing her actually to be, the procession passed, and a great multitude of people swept along at its heels towards the temple square. Any attempt to force a passage through that packed throng would have been useless. This Charmides perceived at once, and presently, as the crowd melted away from where he stood, he turned and began to walk slowly towards the north, along the Â-Ibur-Sabû. In the street there were not a few people who, like himself, had felt it useless to try for a place to see the sacrifice, and, the procession over, were on the way home, perhaps to some family festival. But Charmides saw little enough of those around him. His feet moved mechanically while his thoughts soared.
He had seen her—he had seen Istar. The object of his journey was over; and yet—to leave Babylon now, without knowing more of her, was impossible. He felt that while Babylon was the shrine of such a being, in Babylon he must worship. Sicily, his friends, his mother, were now become things of another life—things fair and dear to think upon, but for which he no longer yearned. Istar, far above his reach as she was, yet made his interest, his religion—in fine, his home—in this new land.
It was while such thoughts as these were mingling in his heart that the Greek found himself brought to a halt. He had come to the end of the famous street that terminated in a square nearly two miles north of the temples of Nebo and his son and the square of the gods. On the edge of the new square Charmides paused and looked around him. Beside him, to the right and to the left, were two large buildings of the usual brick, low-roofed, and surrounded by walls in which the great wrought bronze gates were shut. Through their bars he caught glimpses of fair gardens filled with flowers of brilliant hues and shaded by flowering bushes and tall date-palms. But in these places there was no sign of life; nor was any living creature to be seen on the flat roofs that served, in Babylon, the purpose of summer living-rooms. On the right-hand side of the square stood what was unmistakably a temple. Here, on the top of the broad platform, and again on the steps ascending it, and about the open doors of the holy house, several people moved, while others were dotted on the broad incline that ran around the outside of the ziggurat, or tower, without which no holy building was complete, and which stood, campanile-like, to the left of the temple itself.
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